The Operational Research Research Group Projects

DAASE (Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering) is a five site project between University College London, Queen Mary University of London, University of Birmingham, University of Stirling and University of York. The lead at each site is, respectively, Professors Harman, Yao, Burke and Clark and Dr Ochoa, with Professor Harman as the overall project director. The project also has a growing list of industrial partners, which currently includes Air France – KLM, Berner and Mattner, BT Laboratories, DSTL, Ericsson, GCHQ, Honda Research Institute Europe, IBM, Microsoft Research and VISA UK.

DAASE builds on two successful longer larger projects, funded by the EPSRC and which were widely regarded as highly successful and ground breaking. The project also draws inspiration and support from and feeds into the rapidly growing worldwide Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) community.

Current software development processes are expensive, laborious and error prone. They achieve adaptivity at only a glacial pace, largely through enormous human effort, forcing highly skilled engineers to waste significant time adapting many tedious implementation details. Often, the resulting software is equally inflexible, forcing users to also rely on their innate human adaptivity to find "workarounds". Yet software is one of the most inherently flexible engineering materials with which we have worked, DAASE seeks to use computational search as an overall approach to achieve the software's full potential for flexibility and adaptivity. In so-doing we will be creating new ways to develop and deploy software. This is the new approach to software engineering DAASE seeks to create. It places computational search at the heart of the processes and products it creates and embeds adaptivity into both. DAASE will also create an array of new processes, methods, techniques and tools for a new kind of software engineering, radically transforming the theory and practice of software engineering.

The research has been funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) in response to growing concerns over airport capacity, rising demand, and the impact of congestion on both the travelling public and the air transport industry.

The work will build on the UK's world-leading expertise in Operational Research to find the most efficient ways to schedule flights, developing and testing new models and solution algorithms that take into account all the factors involved in the allocation of flight 'slots': individual airport operations, networks of airports, airline operations, air traffic management systems, airport authorities, civil aviation authorities, airlines and the travelling public.